Business and Leadership

Continuing & Professional Education

Explore the use of analytical methods in management problem-solving, highlighting organizational and contextual issues. Construct an analytical model of a problem that can be manipulated or solved to identify a decision that yields the best outcome, according to one or more carefully defined criteria. The challenges of communicating and implementing results in an organizational context may also be explored through mini-cases and illustrations.

Leading effectively and inclusively in today’s increasingly polarized world requires both head and heart. Building your team’s—and your—ability to adapt to unforeseen realities also requires you to hold steady during periods of intense change. This course uses an adaptive leadership framework to strengthen your ability to tackle complex problems in your professional and personal worlds. Adaptive leadership is a critical tool and skill set for those looking to drive systemic change while being accountable to their own values and goals.

Participants will engage in public learning to test the adaptive diagnostic process together. Public learning is a collaborative process where we use the class itself as a case study, paying attention to how authority and leadership are alive in the classroom, and using classroom engagement itself as a testing ground for these new leadership approaches.

Knowing how to extract real business value from the data generated by your organization is a valuable tool for all managers. Topics may include: foundational information on what is meant by analytics; the various types of analytics - descriptive, predictive and prescriptive; moving from business intelligence to business analytics; theories and trends in data analytics; and the latest best practices and tools available in business analytics, including their advantages and disadvantages.

Business process mapping is a critical activity for creating information required to enable effective performance analysis and improvement. This course will introduce the practical skills needed to map, document, assess, and reformulate business processes. Through interactive discussion and hands-on exercises, participants may gain an understanding of process mapping applications in business process management and tools and skills for conducting business process discovery, analysis and design. Students are encouraged to utilize their own process examples for in-class exercises.

Knowing how to initiate, lead, and manage successful change initiatives is valuable for leaders at all levels. Topics may include: change theories and models; change management strategies; initiating and implementing change; and organizational and individual learning associated with change experiences.

Regardless of your position, everyone plays a role in managing risk within an organization. This course will help provide you with a theoretical understanding of what risk management is and how to use risk management for decision making in order to achieve objectives, as well as create or preserve value for your organization. Topics will include: what is risk, risk management, management and communication, and the value of learning from failure.

Gain an overview of big data, the state of the practice in analytics and the analytics lifecycle as an end-to-end process. Focus on the key roles of a successful analytic project. Topics may include: the main phases of the lifecycle; and developing core deliverables to stakeholders.

A well-managed change helps move an organization into the "new way" quickly, with wide-acceptance by people and minimal disruption. Examine the change process and tools and techniques to manage organizational change. Through reflection on past experience, you will examine key concepts of change and how to utilize a structured method to approach, plan and sustain a change program.

Project management has become a critical skill in every work place. Managers need to know the tools, techniques and have the knowledge to handle projects and deliver successful outcomes. Learn the basics to help you plan, execute, and control project management activities. This is an introductory project management course. We will explore successful projects and why projects that seemingly follow all the necessary rigor and methodology fail. In the end, students will leave with an enhanced ability to plan, execute and control their project management activities.

This seminar has been designed to give new and experienced project managers and project team members the essential tools they need to deliver successful projects. You will acquire the skills, tools and practices necessary, through the use of a real-life case study, for successful project communication, measuring project progress, project close out and transition to operations.

Risk management and resource planning are key elements in the successful completion of a project. The processes and activities necessary to manage risk, a detailed understanding of the increased importance of project procurement, and the core concepts, as well as tools and practices, to be employed for effective project human resource management will be studied in this two-day seminar. Using an applicable case study, the concepts learned in the classroom can be immediately applied to your real-life project.

The next step for business analytics students is to gain an opportunity to use the free software R to perform statistical computing. In this hands-on course, you will be introduced to data manipulation and visualization using the R language, primarily working with a set of packages knows as the tidyverse. At the end of this course you should be able to subset large datasets, apply functions to those subsets, fit simple linear and generalized linear models, and visualize the results in a publication-ready format.